Robin Chapman posts a poem, most days, from fellow poets with one of her watercolors.

4/19/2010

American Life in Poetry: Column 265BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE, 2004-2006

Tell a whiny child that she sounds like a broken record, and she’s likely to say, “What’s a record?” Jeff Daniel Marion, a Tennessee poet, tells us not only what 78 rpm records were, but what they meant to the people who played them, and to those who remember the people who played them.

78 RPM

In the back of the junkhousestacked on a cardtable coveredby a ragged bedspread, they rest,black platters whose music oncecrackled, hissed with a staticlike shuffling feet, fox trot or two-step,the slow dance of the needleriding its merry-go-round,my mother’s head nestledon my father’s shoulder as they turned, lost in the sway of sounds,summer nights and farawayplaces, the syncopation of timewaltzing them to a worldthey never dreamed, danceof then to the dust of now.